Three things to know about… Cabbage soup
The cult film with Louis de Funès, Jean Carmet and Jacques Villeret returns this evening on France 3.
After The Adventures of Rabbi Jacob Sunday evening on France 2, France Télévisions is programming this Monday another comedy by Louis de Funès, La Soupe aux choux, broadcast at 9:10 p.m. on France 3. Laminated by the press when it was released in 1981, the film adapted from the eponymous novel by René Fallet features two old country folk (de Funès and Jean Carmet) who, after a nocturnal farting contest, see an alien (Jacques Villeret) arrive in their hamlet.
Louis de Funès co-directed Cabbage soup
Officially, Louis de Funès only co-directed one film, with his faithful partner Jean Girault, The Miser (1980). The actor, however, did it again a year later on Cabbage soup, ensuring the direction and direction of the actors while his sidekick took care of the technique. But without crediting himself this time.
“Louis is not a technician on set. He’s the actor’s director“, explained Jean Carmet in Première, in 1981. “He walked everywhere with Fallet’s book under his arm: it was his bible! If there was any problem, he would consult him. As for his way of working, I won’t betray anything by saying that I was surprised – by reading over his shoulder! — some of the annotations he had written in the margins of his script: they referred to these people he knew or even to members of his family. (…) These are things that help him and it is thanks to all this accumulation of observations that, often, his characters find their existence.“
The fart contest almost didn’t appear in the film
Louis de Funès was very involved in the project. It was he who had the idea of bringing to the screen, on the advice of his son, the novel by René Fallet, a popular author adapted several times for the cinema with not always very happy results (The Scooter, The old men of the old days, Paris in August…). Start working on Cabbage soup was rather annoying, and his friend the director Yves Robert had also strongly advised him not to keep the fart contest between “le Glaude” and “le Bombé”. De Funès of course did not listen to him. This scene, if it crystallized criticism of the vulgarity of the film, certainly gave it its cult status, being a hit with children during the numerous TV rebroadcasts which increased the popularity of the film.
Critics couldn’t see Cabbage soup
The film’s producer, Christian Fechner, sets up a major promotional campaign for the film and, aware that it risks being poorly received by critics, decides not to organize a screening for the press. Worse, he arranged so that journalists could not go see the film during its first week of release.
“Film critics for whom entry to theaters is free, thanks to their professional card, are seen, for Cabbage souprefuse this right during the first week of exclusivity“, reported Le Monde at the time. “Whether they said good or bad about it, they never had any influence on the commercial success of Jean Girault’s films with Louis de Funès (the series of Constable, For example). Would we fear, this time, that they will distract the public from this cinematic broth by putting their feet in the soup?”
Despite these precautions, Choice Soup will not experience great success in theaters, with “only” 3 million spectators, a disappointing score for Louis de Funès, the king of the box office capable of selling 17 million tickets with The big mopor 11 million with Le Corniaud. And the press will not hesitate to criticize the film, in particular because of its crudeness, once they have seen it.
